


Absolute

by Batty



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anxiety, F/M, Gen, Hale Family Feels, Insecurity, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Mystery, Old Friends, Pack Dynamics, Pack Feels, The Hale Family, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, crack theory, derek fancies himself a member of mystery inc, even when she doesn't remember it, for the love of god just ask her out already derek, i saw on tumblr, is no reason not to kiss the girl, like fred or something, losing a member of your pack is painful, seriously derek communicate with your damn little sis, spoiler: he's scooby, that can't seem to remember each other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:28:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batty/pseuds/Batty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there’s one thing Derek hopes Jennifer won’t remember, it’s how fucking obvious he’d been about his stupid teenage crush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ahaha guess how obsessed i am with this ship go ahead guess

When the sun finally comes out Derek doesn’t even notice.

His eyes are too busy being clenched shut to keep from screaming at the sight of what Boyd and Cora were doing to him. He'd blinked before and accidentally caught a peak of a light pink that could almost be his insides about to spill out and he’s not eager to repeat the nauseous spell that’d almost had him chucking up everything in his empty—clawed apart—stomach.

He only realizes they’ve stopped when he hears Cora’s breath hitch as the moon fever leaves her, a familiar sound that hits him with a wave of nostalgia. Derek’s too tired to look over at her and check if she’s making that stupid face again, the one with her eyebrows furrowed all serious-like that she’d practiced in the mirror for days because she’d thought it made her look tough. He almost wants to start crying at the bittersweet memory, but again, he’s too tired, even to respond to Boyd’s low curse as they peel their now normal hands away from his mangled torso.

Derek knows he should say something, tell them it’s fine, all right, but his tongue refuses to move. His body is too busy repairing itself from the brink of death to leave him enough energy to talk. Besides, Boyd and Cora are probably two seconds away from being hit by the exhaustion that comes from losing yourself on a full moon—

Ah. There it was.

They fall to the ground with a thud and he falls with them, his knees hitting the floor and god, he can’t even summon the energy to wince. Derek takes several shuddering breaths as the gouges in the walls of his major organs begin to seal up. He still feels the wounds, like a phantom pain that he knows he’ll never get rid of, like the smell of smoke and burnt wood that seems to have nestled up in a corner of his brain, taunting him whenever he thinks he’s almost forgotten. He wants to scream, cry, bang his head against a wall to knock it loose and he almost does.

It’s a blessing when Scott comes, followed closely by Isaac. They stare for a while.

Derek raises his head slowly, all too aware of each individual muscle on his chest as it repairs itself. They’re looking at him like he’s a monster. He takes a breath, shuddering when wind from the open door ghosts over a bloody gouge. He doesn’t want to answer the question in their eyes. So he just says, his own closed so he can’t see the light, “There’s a teacher. I’ll take care of her.”

They don’t say anything. Each breath of his is more a shake than an inhale, and now Derek is more than certain that one of them may have nicked his lungs during the ordeal. “Get them out of here.” At this, Scott and Isaac finally move, each grabbing an unconscious body and picking it up neatly as they walk towards the door.

They still haven’t said a word. Derek feels disappointed for some reason, but quickly brushes it away.  Neither of them could have known he’d been waiting for some sort of answer, maybe a rebuttal, telling him he was in no way fit to get up, much less approach a teacher and explain to her that she’s not to say a word. But it’s too late now.

He rises to his feet, slowly, grunting from the sheer exertion. His most visible wounds haven’t healed yet, his wolf working overtime simply to keep the internal bleeding in check. Derek almost falls over when he fully straightens. Thankfully, both Isaac and Scott are gone by now. Thankfully. He tells himself he means that.

Walking in halting steps, he’s glad when each gets faster, more sure the closer he gets to the back of the boiler room. Who put school supplies in the goddamn boiler room? Derek struggles to keep from growling in disgust. This fucking school. He’s more than completely done with it at this point. When his sensory functions have almost gone back to their normal heightened range, just as he’s about to pull the steel mesh door open, one more wave of nostalgia rushes over him.

Furrowing his brows in confusion just as Cora had done not minutes ago, Derek pauses and struggles to reconcile the familiar feeling with the situation. It’s a bittersweet kind of thing, something that stirs a long forgotten crevice in his chest. His stomach is tying itself in knots despite the gashes. It’s painful.

He ignores it.

Pushing his way into the dark room, Derek seeks her out. He looks around between the shelves, trying to catch a glimpse of the woman who’d been standing where he was just moments ago, staring shock-faced at two ravenous werewolves. As that strange smell grows stronger, it occurs to him to wonder why she hadn’t run.

In a strange, paradoxical way, it gets lighter with each step he takes into the room, the sun behind him rising as his stomach turns and a strange heat settles itself over his healing muscles. Derek wants to scratch at his skin, peeved, wanting nothing more than to get this over with and collapse in the small bed in his apartment to sleep until he woke up needy and wanting for the comfort of pack—which he couldn’t risk giving himself with the alphas on the loose.

He stands there for a few seconds, annoyed.

And then she peeks out from behind the large steel shelf.

A pain lances through his chest at the exact moment Derek realizes that it’s not a pain at all, it’s recognition, it’s understanding, it’s a heat that’s thrumming from his very bones, turning him this way and that. His face grows blank.

It’s Jenny.

She’s breathing hard like she’s just finished running with Laura, her light eyes wide and staring at him like she’s not quite sure what he’s doing here. For a moment Derek thinks the same, trying to understand where the teacher went and why Jenny was here before his mind catches up to the situation.

He looks her over, eyes flicking from her hair to the bare length of skin running from where her skirt ends to her shoes and something in him wants to collapse in relief. _How_. Derek wants to scream, wants to ask her what she’s doing here, what happened to her after him and Laura skipped town, why he can’t seem to stop from reaching his hand out to check that she was really there and not a dream.

Except she looks terrified. He realizes this when she almost flinches at the sight of his hand coming towards her, when she’d normally just laugh at him trying to act all tough and smile so hard he’d feel like he was exploding, his face red and eyes narrowed like when he was first trying to get a good scowl down.

Jenny had been Laura’s friend since forever and it’d always killed him that he’d never stopped being that little kid brother to her.

Even when he’d started staring at her after he’d hit puberty, ignoring his older sister’s cries for him to stop eating _everything_ just to be able to sit at the same table as her and Jenny, where he’d try to catch her scent as discretely as he could while Laura glared daggers. It was hard to keep a crush hidden from a house full of werewolves and more often than not he’d find his mother smiling or Uncle Peter smirking at him whenever he’d rush out the door to trail behind Jenny and Laura on their way to high school.

And then there was the whole thing where he couldn’t seem to stand near her without freaking out, his launch into puberty crossing over with his more powerful inner wolf to the point where when she even touched him affectionately he’d find himself turning red, already half-hard and trying to hide how desperately he wanted her.

Derek keeps his mouth shut even now, a strange fear rising that if he so much as said a word his voice would break and she’d give him an embarrassed smile as Laura laughed so hard she nearly broke the desk.

She still hasn’t taken his hand. He waits, trying to breathe as evenly as he can while still avoiding taking too much of her strange bittersweet smell. The part that’s distinctly her is sweet, almost cloying at his senses to the point where he gets the urge to start clawing at his own skin again.

The fear is bitter.

Breathing hard, she takes his hand and Derek tries to ignore how perfectly it fits in his. He doesn’t really manage, his fingers acting against his will and drawing her closer until she’s standing. She’s shaking. He wants to ask so many things now, but there’s something strange prickling in the corner of his head, where the clogging burnt smell comes to a head.

She rubs one of her arms like she’s cold and he gets a strange urge to step closer and help, but his mind is racing faster now, realizing there’s something different about her scent. Derek tries to pick it out, oblivious to the soft expression on his own face. When she stares at him a moment too long, her eyes wet with tears of hysteria, it hits him.

She grimaces for a second when his hand closes over hers a little too tight, but it’s brushed away by an instinctive apologetic smile that he knows all too well even if she doesn’t.

Derek tries to keep from puking when he fails to find recognition in her own scent, the part that usually held affection for him and his sister blank and unnatural, like someone had cauterized and left it to burn. The wounds on his chest are healing slowly now, but the pain in his chest seems to have doubled.

Because she doesn’t remember him at all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> on a scale of one to ten how obvious it is that i'm just doing whatever the fuck i want with this fic

After spending nearly an hour building up the strength to rip himself away from her after he drops her off outside her apartment, Derek feels like his instinct to check up on Jenny first thing in the morning is a little too close to self-indulgence for his tastes. So he fights the need to go after her and pellet her with questions of how and what and _why_. He tells himself it’s because she probably needs some time to adjust to the fact she almost got mauled by two supernatural creatures.

He ignores the fact that it’s because he knows if he visits her this soon, it would take longer than just an hour to tear himself away.

But it’s not an obsession, of course not. It was simple nostalgia. He’ll talk to her later, but he just has to _think_ first, get her out of his mind already where she was running circles like his brain was the track outside the high school where she and Laura would practice and joke on every Saturday morning.

It’s because of this small self-sacrifice that Derek gets back to his own apartment in time to catch Cora starting her fifth set of pushups.

Only just half-awake, he groans. _“Cora.”_

She ignores him, flipping the towel over her shoulder as she abruptly stands and reaches for a pipe, presumably to start even more pull-ups. Derek folds his arms and steps around so she has to look at him every time she lifts herself up.

“You literally just collapsed from exhaustion a couple hours ago.”

Cora doesn’t respond, just pursing her lips as she pulls herself up again.

Derek almost wants to growl. What was it these days with people ignoring him? “Just stop and give yourself a break.”

Anger flares in her eyes like a spark going off and she drops. Her eyes flicker yellow. Breathing heavily, Cora scowls and retorts, “Yea, like the break I had during those three months when I was _trapped.”_

He almost winces from the guilt. He should have known she had arrived at Beacon Hills from the first moment she had stepped into the town lines, and the reminder was a low blow. “There was nothing you could do.”

Cora is the one who flinches, looking almost hurt. Derek gives himself a moment to wonder why but before it’s over she’s covering the vulnerable expression up, her face hard and scowling. “Wow Derek, thanks for the reminder.”

“What?” he replies, exasperated, wishing in some distance space in his mind that the first time his little sister said his name after nearly a decade hadn’t been this. Or spat with quite so much vitriol. “What have I done now?”

“No, no, you’ve done plenty,” Cora starts, folding her arms is a mockery of his stance, “I’m just the one who can’t seem to do anything,” he starts at this, frowning as she launches into her tirade with eyes still flashing yellow, “I’m just little baby Cora again, the one who can’t do anything right, who has to keep waiting for big sis and bro to come in and _save the freaking day!”_

Derek is so lost right now that he’s sure he’s almost gaping. “Where did you get that from?”

She shoves past him, still breathing hard despite the fact that her body had to have already recovered from the exertion of exercise. “What, like you’re not thinking it? Either way, I’m done lying around.”

“Then sit!” Derek exclaims, torn between wondering what the fuck was going on with Cora and the other mystery of what the fuck was going on with Jenny. He actually cannot handle this much fucking questions. His mind is gonna rip itself apart one of these days.

“Well, are you gonna help me go after them?” Cora shoots back, starting her next set of pushups and from this angle Derek can actually see the strain on her face as she forces each one. She is _not_ ready to be doing this, dammit. She needs to rest and recuperate and watching her hurt herself all over again makes him want to slam his head against a wall.

But then again, it’s not like he doesn’t recognize the impulse to work out so hard that you couldn’t feel your muscles the next morning. Wasn’t that exactly how he’d spent the first few months back here at Beacon Hills? His eyes grow hard and he clenches his jaw. Back then there was no one to tell him to stop. He’s not letting that happen to her.

Derek reaches a foot out and knocks one of her hands to the side. It’s a testament to how shaky her form was that it knocks her over completely. She stares back up at him from the floor, her eyes blazing with anger that he mourns the sight of. With the bullshit that seemed to surround everything related to his past nowadays, Derek hadn’t thought it too much to ask that his little sister at least look at him with something close to compassion.

Thinking in some burnt portion of his mind that he’d actually take burning fury as an in emotion in Jenny’s eyes instead of that achingly painful _blankness_ , Derek finds his mouth moving of its own volition before Cora even finds the strength to stand. “Laura’s dead and Peter’s a fucking sociopathic asshole.”

This stops her right in her tracks. She stares up at him in confusion, something painfully innocent in her wide eyes. “But Laura died in the fire.””

Something in Derek’s chest seems to collapse.

He forces himself to say, “Laura and me escaped. We thought we were the only ones.” Derek can’t meet her eyes at this, knowing they’re probably full of blame and rejection. He knows they should have looked harder for other survivors, but it had been so dark and the smell of the burning flesh of their own family and pack had made their noses useless. “We got out of town and went to New York City. To try and find some of mom’s friends and get them to help us figure out who did it.”

Now Derek really can’t look at her, keeping his arms folded like a clasp to keep his own insides from spilling out. It hadn’t felt quite this painful last night. “No one would. We ended up staying there. For a while. There was,” he takes a deep, shuddering breath, “There was no one else to go.”

In his heightened peripheral vision, Derek can see Cora frozen still, waiting for him to continue. His lips keep moving like they’re not a part of his body anymore. It’s a catharsis of sorts; not to have another piece of himself to keep track of. Something less to fuck things up with, he guesses. “Stuff ended up happening. Laura came back to Beacon Hills to check something out. Peter killed her to become alpha, “ he says this as emotionless as he can manage, but even he can’t help pausing to blink rapidly when Cora’s hands rush to cover her mouth, “It turned out being a vegetable for all those years made him snap.”

She interrupts once, her voice a hushed whisper, “ _Uncle_ Peter?”

Derek doesn’t have the strength to answer with words, so he just nods once. Her face crumples at that and decides then and there that he’s not gonna explain the rest of it—how Peter vowed revenge, tricked him into helping, tried to raise his own pack, was killed by Derek’s own hand, and then emotionally manipulated a sixteen year old girl into raising him from the dead. Cora can assume whatever she wants about how he became alpha. It’d still be better than the truth.

“It’s done now. I’m alpha and I’ll make sure things get back to normal.” He unconsciously stands up straighter, trying to radiate a subtle confidence he doesn’t actually have.

Derek wishes suddenly that Laura was here to laugh and chew him out for trying to be something he wasn’t, like all those games of pretend they used to play as children together. He misses that.

He’s so lost in his own thoughts that when Cora abruptly stands up and launches herself at him, she manages to get in a single punch before he begins to instinctually block her. There’s barely hidden pain and anger on her face, the results of thinking for a decade that she was all alone in the world before finding out that it was pretty much _true_ , with the exception of him and her homicidal uncle.

And Derek hardly counts as adequate company.

So he just blocks everything she throws at him, the pain of being struck by the same little sister he used to help beat bullies off the other kids far exceeding anything a punch could deliver.

“Come on, fight back!” Cora cries, breathing so hard that even he knows that it’s more from trying to keep the sobs back than anything exertion on her part. He ignores her, taking a masochistic pleasure in the fact that if she was hitting him than it at least meant she was alive and remembered him. Unlike some people. “Or are you too _good_ for that now? You tell me _all_ about how you’ve gotten so _big_ and _tough_ , but now you’re too above us to spar with your own family? _Have you forgotten about us completely!”_

The words hit the button her fists couldn’t and Derek grabs her by the forearms to stop her himself. He finally shows some expression, anger bleeding into his voice as his lips curl into a snarl. “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about!”

Cora forces herself out of his grasp and says bitterly, “Right, cause I just don’t know anything. I came back to this stupid town for nothing. Got myself thrown into a vault for three fucking months for _nothing_.”

There’s enough of the big brother Derek used to be that he frowns at her cursing. It’s certainly better than knowing that the nothing she’s talking about is him.

“I mean, god,” she continues, not content to let it end at that, intent on driving the knife deeper, “Is there anything you even care enough about now? Or are you too _good_ for that now, letting all of us little betas lounge around while you pick up the slack as the big bad alpha? Face it—you just don’t care for anyone anymore. Not your family, not your past, _nothing_.”

It’s a statement, not a declaration.

And Derek finds suddenly that he’s so sick of this, too tired to argue about this stupid meaningless _crap_ anymore. His fists are clenched at his sides so hard that they’re white. Still exhausted from the night, he says the first thing that comes to mind, “Jenny’s here. She was the teacher in the boiler room last night that you and Boyd attacked.”

He has to take a deep breath to stabilize himself after that because he’s almost shaking from the force of letting it go. He hadn’t meant to tell her. Cora was in a bad enough place without hearing that something supernatural had gotten to Laura’s old best friend. And left her without any memories of them or the pack. This was also gonna make things worse. He shouldn’t have said anything.

When Derek looks up, Cora is pale as death. She asks quietly, “I didn’t…”

“No,” he cuts in before she gets the wrong idea, and also because a small part of him seized at the mere thought, “She’s alive. Intact.”

Cora’s eyes are wide and she heaves with sheer relief, her shoulders slouching from their aggressive tilt. “I almost…I didn’t—how?” she seems to come to that final question suddenly, her face scrunched up in confusion that looks so like the image of the little girl he used to help with math homework because she didn’t understand why equations needed to have _letters_ in them too that Derek almost smiles.

Instead, he relaxes his arms, letting them drop to his sides, and answers, “She doesn’t seem to remember anything. Something got to her. Stole her memories.” Cora looks almost frightened at the thought of something being powerful enough to take the entire memory of _pack_ away that Derek feels the need to add, “It’s nothing that can’t be fixed. We’ll figure this out together.”

Her anxiety turns rapidly to shock. Cora stares at him for a second, lips slightly parted like she was seeing a ghost.  

“That’s the first time,” she starts, before hesitating to lick her dry lips and continuing even more quietly, like the words themselves were disappearing into a void of smoke, “That’s the first time you’ve said ‘we’ since I met you. It just,” she shuffles from foot to foot, staring at the floor, “You just sounded so much like…”

An ache blossoms in his chest, the same one that’s been consuming him since his first day back in Beacon Hills. Both of them turn their faces away, feeling the loss of Laura like a phantom limb.

She would’ve gotten this argument shut down in seconds with that stern look she’d stolen from their mom. She always had. From the moment Laura had been able to talk and boss people around it had been obvious to everyone that she was going to inherit the title of alpha. Derek misses having that certainty and knows for the first time in this conversation that Cora feels the same.

After a few moments, where the tension and petty anger seem to drain away into the nexus of cooling cinders and wood smoke, Derek speaks up again, “It can’t be a coincidence. You and Jenny coming back at the same time.” He knows that she had to have gotten the position as a regular English teacher and not just a substitute far in advance, since the end of the previous school year at the latest. “They’re connected.”

Pushing an errant strand of hair behind her ear, Cora frowns and says, “I heard from the grapevine about a powerful alpha building a pack. That it was a Hale. I assumed,” she seems to shrink for a moment, “I assumed that it was Laura.”

“Maybe you’re not the only one,” Derek states plainly, choosing to ignore again the sudden clenching of his chest. When Cora just looks at him blankly, he sighs. “Whatever took her memory couldn’t have taken it all. Maybe she remembered something, enough so that if she heard about a Hale alpha building a pack it would trigger her return.”

“How would she hear about it if she was human, though?”

“Someone had to have told her. And known.”

Understanding, Cora stands up straighter. “The Alpha pack?”

“Maybe,” Derek says honestly. That’s about as far as he had gotten himself, assuming that Jenny coming to Beacon Hills at the same time as all this other shit happening _couldn’t_ have been a coincidence.

And joining in with the other strange, fucked up things going in this one freaking day, Derek’s thoughts halt right in their tracks the moment he hears a small, choked off sob coming from Cora’s direction. He’s seized with a brief panic. What _now?_

Cora is staring straight at the floor, arms adhered to her sides. Her voice cracks a little as she says, “This isn’t fair.”

He wants to tell her to join the damn club, but the small piece of brotherly memory left in him screams that _it wouldn’t be a good fucking idea._

If there’s anything being the eldest boy out of so many sisters has taught him, it’s to keep his damn mouth shut.

“God, I mean, you’ve changed so much and I’m just the same scared girl and, _god_ ,” Cora spits, her clenched fists shaking, “I hate it so much. How come you’re all strong and a powerful alpha and I can’t even, god, I could barely keep myself _alive_ all those years. Do you have any idea how it felt to hear that you were alive? I thought that when I found someone else that I’d stop being so fucking _lonely_ all the time, but it’s worse now because I can barely recognize you, Derek!”

Her voices rises throughout the entire tirade until she’s screaming at him, her throat tearing itself raw with her pain.

Derek is officially out of his comfort zone.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he says honestly, and that’s the kicker because he really is sorry. Sorry for all of this. “You’re not the first one to hate me after all these years.”

Her face turns hard. Her next words surprise him.

“I don’t hate you, Derek,” Cora says, her voice still angry and like an open wire, sizzling to the touch. “God, you’re my big brother.” Her eyes are wide and wet with emotion. “You’re my big brother and I’ve just, I just miss you so much.” She runs a hand through her ponytail like she always used to when she was nervous and didn’t want to show it and that memory is what breaks him.

Derek’s eyes soften and he steps closer, saying, “Cora, I—“

And that’s when the alarm goes off.

x

In the aftermath of Deucalion and his two pet alphas, Derek is left pissed and trading disbelieving looks with his younger sister.

He’d been close enough to stop her from rushing off to attack the steroid-junkie alpha, knowing that if the alphas wanted them dead, it wouldn’t be done like this. Cora’s small hesitation allowed him to keep calm when Kali attacked, dodging all her blows rather than facing her head on like she wanted him to. When the ‘demon wolf’ had finally made his appearance, he’d told all three alphas to stand down so they could chat like reasonable people and not sociopaths like a _certain_ Peter Hale.

Although Derek had just barely managed to keep a straight face during Deucalion’s little thunder routine, not when Cora had been making her trademark _‘you-repulse-me-so-very-much’_ expression the entire time.

“So,” she draws out, barely hiding her smirk now that the bat-shit crazy alpha pack were all gone, “Seems like _the_ _Duke_ really has a plan for you.”

“Not interested,” Derek replies, grimacing at the thought of killing one of his own. It’s such a _perversion_ of pack that he knows the alphas that actually do it have to be lying to themselves about the ‘liberation’ of it all. He can’t fault them for it. To kill your own and not feel any differently afterwards? That could drive an alpha to insanity—if they weren’t insane already to have even tried it at all.

Cora folds her arms and asks, “So. What are we gonna do about it?” She looks up at him with an almost smile on her face, looking calmer now that she had screamed herself raw at him.

He can’t meet her eyes.

“Oh no, you’re not pulling that.”

Frowning, Cora steps to the side and ducks her head so he has to look at her. “This new self-sacrificing thing you’ve got going? Yeah. That shit has gotta stop right now, Derek,” she says plainly, folding her arms across her chest.

Derek had almost forgotten how bossy all the women in his family were.

He sighs, too used to being pushed around by them to care anymore. “I don’t know,” he admits. “It’s smartest to send you all away, so they at least _think_ I’m buying their proposal.”

“So you’re kicking us out into the cold, empty world alone?” Cora says, her voice a little too hard for it to be a joke. “Well, if you haven’t checked the news lately the weather forecast says it’s gonna rain and yeah. I am _not_ going out in that.”

“Well, what do you want?” Derek cries, exasperated and just now remembering how much his family could drive him up the wall even when they weren’t sociopathic. “I can’t leave you here! They can _break in_ at any time.”

Cora stares right at him, looking a little too smug for his liking. She bats her eyelashes like Laura used to when she was schmoozing their parents for more allowance. She asks smoothly, “How many bedrooms did you say Jenny’s apartment had?”

He blinks. “No.”

“Yes.”

_“No.”_

“Yes times infinity.” Cora grins and pushes herself up to the tips of her toes to try and match his height. "I win. Plus, we'll kill two birds with one werewolf."

"Stone."

"Werewolf."

"Werewolves." Derek pinches the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache building. He knew from personal experience that she could keep this going on forever. He had to negotiate for Isaac's inclusion early on, if possible. Maybe Jenny would freak out less if one of her actual students showed up on her doorstop as well.

A sigh. "Fine." Cora's pouting a little, but that smug looks is still in full force. She knows she won. She's actually preening a little bit.

Yep. Derek is definitely questioning his sanity now—just how fucked up must he have been to actually _miss_ this?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i went and doofed and actually came up with an actual plot for this fic and the theory behind it, so I'm just gonna roll with canon as it comes, sticking true with the AU when I feel like it. Derek's 'meeting' with Ms. Blake is gonna be in the next chapter, since it made more sense to have it happen that way now


End file.
